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Amit. S. Rai and Hypatia Vourloumis, Substantive Collectivity.

In beating a refrain inflected by Deleuze and
Guattari’s notion of “substantive multiplicity” this joint presentation will
experimentally rhythm reflections that tie the shifting terrains of class
struggle and racial justice to the feminist revolutions in social reproduction
from Mumbai to Athens. We aim to pose the question of how to link up through a
practice of memory and a practice of politics the becoming resonant with
concrete struggles of sabotage, jugaad (work around), of calibaning and
witching, of studying, hacking, squatting, disrupting, exiting, and queering.
If, for Deleuze and Guattari, an author writing is a common action (pluralism
equals monism) then intensity, flow and process and not meaning are of
significance. Turning away from methods rooted in epistemologizing pluralism
and difference then, we will compose, cut, and study echoes and refrains
together through processes of division, separation, collection and inclusive
disjunction. These molecular and micro-political compositions and solidarities
are constitutive and reverberate as dissonant, counter-actualising refrains,
the incongruous concurrences of motley crews. The Invisible Committee write
that revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance. Our
presentation will attempt to trace the ways a poesis and rhythm of collectivity
is made up of and unfurls resonances as well as resonate “a-signifying
ruptures,” and the ways in which the refrain sounds out substantive
collectivity in its repeated difference.

Amit S. Rai teaches at Queen Mary, University of
London. His study of new media in India, entitled Untimely Bollywood:
Globalization and India’s New Media Assemblage was published by Duke University
Press in 2009. Previously he was an associate professor of film, media, and
postcolonial studies at Florida State University. He received his PhD in Modern
Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 1995 in anthropology and
postcolonial criticism, and has taught at the New School for Social Research
and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. He is also the author of Rule of
Sympathy: Race, Sentiment, and Power (Palgrave: 2002). He is currently at work
on a monograph on Indian urban mobile phone cultures tentatively titled, Jugaad
Time: Media, Sensation, and Value.

“Desire does not lack anything,” Deleuze and Guattari
polemically claim in Anti-Oedipus (1972/1973), thus summarizing their
inextricably theoretical and political critique of psychoanalysis, namely, the
negative conception of desire as lack. For Deleuze and Guattari, psychoanalysis
is guilty of a dictatorial reductionism implemented by the conceptual
(representational) figures of the Freudian Oedipus and the Lacanian phallus as
the two major operators of negativation of desire and repression of the
productive and creative forces of the unconscious in general. “Psychoanalysis,”
as stated in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), “subjects the unconscious to
arborescent structures . . . central organs, the phallus, the phallus-tree.” In
Derridean terms, this raises the question of the phallus as a transcendental
signifier/signified, which organizes and governs the economy of desire,
castration and lack, as well as of the so-called phallogocentrism of the
unconscious. Merging the philosophical vocabulary of Derrida with that of
Deleuze and Guattari, I propose the term phallo-arborocentrism, in reference to
which I will attempt to display, first, that the Lacanian phallus is
characterized by a conceptual pluralism not easily reduced to the figure of the
tree, thus constituting a deterritorializing rhizome rather than an arborescent
structure; and second, that while, in the early Lacan of the primacy of the
Symbolic, the phallic signifier institutes desire as lack, there is another
Lacan, the later Lacan, who, as Deleuze and Guattari admit in Anti-Oedipus,
defines desire in terms of a real production through the object small α as a
desiring-machine.

Charis Raptis has been awarded a PhD in Media
Philosophy and Aesthetics by the Panteion University of Athens. He has taught
cultural and communication theories in the MA Program in Cultural Management at
Panteion University and theory and image in the MA Program in Digital Arts at
the Athens School of Fine Arts. He is the author of Poe, Lacan, Derrida: Connections
(Athens: Smili, 2013 – in Greek). He is a member of the editorial board of the
Greek journal for psychoanalysis, philosophy and the arts, αληthεια. His
research interests and publications centre on Lacanian psychoanalysis,
continental philosophy, media theory and their intersection.

harisraptis@gmail.com

Jason Read, The Affective Economy: Producing and
Consuming Affects in Deleuze and Guattari

The thought of Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari)
bears on ambiguous relation with respect to the “affective turn” in critical
thought that it supposedly helped initiate. This ambiguity touches on the very
role and meaning of affects. From Deleuze’s writings on Nietzsche and Spinoza
through the collaborations of Capitalism and Schizophrenia Deleuze and Guattari
insist on the central role of the affects, joy, sadness, fear, and hope, as
structuring individual and collective life. In that sense, Deleuze and Guattari
are rightfully hailed as central figures in a turn towards affect. However, if,
as some argue, the “affective turn” is a turn towards the lived over the
structural and the intimate over the public and objective, then Deleuze and
Guattari’s thought has a much more complex relation to affects. The broader
polemical target of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, beyond the specific
polemics with psychoanalysis, is any explanatory theory that would reduce
social relations to intimate and individual relations. Deleuze and Guattari’s
claim that there is only “the desire and the social, and nothing else” is
oriented against such individualistic accounts of subjectivity. Moreover,
Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of capitalism as defined by axioms rather
than codes is that of a social relation that reproduces itself in and through
the encounter of abstract quantities of money and labor power, a social
relation that is indifferent to the beliefs and meaning that we attach to it.
Thus, if affect is central to Deleuze and Guattari’s thought it is necessary to
add the caveats that affect must be thought of as anti-individualistic, as
social rather than intimate, as in some sense impersonal. It is then the
strength of Deleuze and Guattari's thought that it posits affect as not only
rigorously transindividual, but also economic and political rather than
psychic.

The objective of my presentation is to extract, from
D&G’s work, an important ethical motive. Following Foucault, I understand
ethics as a reflection on the modes of subjectivation or “practices of the
self”. I’m going to argue that those practices (or exercises) have basically
two modalities: paranoid and schizophrenic. In the introduction I will discuss
the Foucauldian conception of ascetics as a part of his project of the ethic of
the Self. In the first part I am going to interpret the theory of practice
presented by Sloterdijk in his book You Must Change Your Life as a development
of Foucauldian ethical project. After shedding some light upon the very concept
of practice in Sloterdijk, I will discuss the issue of vertical tension and
hierarchy. I believe that the autoplastic practices/exercises analyzed by
German philosopher follow the scheme of paranoid regime. In the second part I
will discuss the D&G concept of becoming and interpret it in terms of
schizophrenic regime of the ethical exercise. I shall argue that the true
meaning of ethical exercise/practice (if it should remain a practice of
freedom) is becoming rather than surpassing the others. In closing remarks I
will point at some weaknesses of Foucault’s project. My conclusion will be,
that only a foucauldodeleuzoguattarian ethics, an ethics of the
Self-in-becoming, may sound like a refrain of freed.

Cezary Rudnicki (1986) – nomad and pagan; editor and
co-founder of Machina Myśli – Internet portal to popularize philosophy; PhD
student in the Department of History of Contemporary Philosophy, University of
Warsaw, where he is preparing a dissertation devoted to the ethics of the Self;
he published articles about Deleuze and Guattari, Benjamin, Foucault and
Mumford.

Togasi.furebo@gmail.com

Andrew Robinson, (co-author Phoebe Moore) The Politics
of Wearables: The Quantified Self at Work

The quantified self movement (QSM) is an emerging
trend identified by a range of technological devices used for self-tracking.
Such technologies can be used for first-person digital ethnographies,
lifelogging, and self-tracking of mental and physical activities as well as recording
surroundings and actions also seen in the police force (Atkinson, 2014) and
professional sports (Wade, 2014). Emerging discussions in the QSM neglect to
identify the exploitative, political economy aspects of such technologies,
usually portraying them as improvements in self-knowledge and happiness (see
recent Goldsmiths/Rackspace report and Wilson, 2013b; Nield, 2014). QS
technologies treat body and mind as interconnected and inseparable, challenging
the dualism of body and mind in practice even while affirming it in rhetoric.
However, they tend to unite body and mind under the sign of mind, as techniques
of managerial (mental) control, what Rose (2001) terms the 'politics of life
itself'. The difficulty, however, is that this politics does not speak to ‘life
itself’, any more than Fordism or medievalism. What it speaks to is a
particular quantitative, spatial representation of life. From a
Deleuzian-Bergsonian viewpoint, what is missing here is any awareness of the
dimension of life as such – the field of the temporal, of becoming and
differenciation, and of the unique experience of life – in Marxian terms, of
labour-power prior to its equivalential capture by capital.

Marc Rölli: Deleuze and Radical Pragmatism

Since the book on David Hume (1953) a pragmatist
inspiration is alive in the work of Deleuze, that is influenced by the William
James readings of Jean Wahl. In them not only the proximity of pragmatism to
Bergsonism is expressed. From the beginning, especially the pluralistic setting
in Deleuze's pragmatism plays a central role. In my contribution, this
commitment to pluralism will be reflected in its theoretical importance,by
addressing Deleuze's later Nietzsche and Spinoza readings, the difference
philosophy and it’s ontological and epistemological implications. Even the
„generalized pragmatics“ in Mille Plateaux or the idea of „immanence“ in What
is Philosophy? is driven by a radical understanding of pragmatist beliefs.